GERALDINE FAGAN
The people of Lviv in far western Ukraine may be among the most traditionally observant Christian inhabitants of the former Soviet Union. As the editor of the East-West Church Report strolled through the city’s cobbled streets one Sunday in late 2018, peals of church bells filled the crisp fall air. At St. Andrew’s—one of numerous Greek Catholic churches downtown—some 400 parishioners flocked to the third morning service, many kneeling on the stone floor due to lack of pew space. Within half a mile, the far smaller community of Roman Catholics still has a choice of nine Sunday Masses at the Cathedral of the Assumption. St. George’s—Lviv’s main Orthodox parish under the Moscow Patriarchate—offers three Sunday morning liturgies, with perhaps 400 attending in total. Celebrating their restoration to communion with the Patriarchate of Constantinople the previous week, parishes of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church and the Kyiv Patriarchate were also bustling when the East-West Church Report looked in. Several hundred faithful of all ages streamed out of the latter’s Intercession Cathedral following its 11 a.m. liturgy, the third there that morning. This is even before one considers the dozen or more Evangelical communities beyond Lviv’s historic center.
Polling suggests the same story. In Lviv and the other six westernmost regions of Ukraine, over 90 percent surveyed in 2018 identified as believers, according to the Kyiv-based Razumkov Center. Around 50 percent said they had attended worship that past week. In eastern Ukraine, these figures are markedly lower—around 60 and 10 percent respectively. A key reason for this discrepancy is that the westernmost regions of Ukraine formed part of independent Poland between the two World Wars, thus escaping the worst of the Soviet onslaught against religion.
Yet another is the tenacity of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church (UGCC), concentrated in Lviv, IvanoFrankivsk, Ternopil, and Transcarpathia regions. (Here and in the other three western regions—Chernivtsi, Rivne, and Volyn—Orthodoxy is also strong.) The UGCC’s distinctive nature—holding to Orthodox customs, such as icons and married clergy, but recognizing the Pope—derives from a 1596 agreement to enter into communion with Rome made by local Orthodox bishops. Since then, Ukrainian Greek Catholics’ relationship with Orthodox under Moscow has remained tense at best. In 1946 it was shattered by the UGCC’s forced “reunification” with the Moscow Patriarchate at a synod orchestrated in Lviv by the Soviet authorities. This rendered Greek Catholic practice illegal in the USSR for more than four decades.
Following the UGCC’s legalization under Gorbachev in 1989, its Lviv Theological Academy was revived and then inaugurated as the Ukrainian Catholic University in 2002. The original Academy had been founded in 1928 under Polish rule by then UGCC leader Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky. It was shuttered when the Soviet Union annexed the area in 1939 in accordance with the Molotov-Rippentrop Pact. Occupying Nazi forces permitted the seminary to function to a very limited extent from 1941, but it was again closed once Soviet forces recaptured the territory in 1944. In 1963 Sheptytsky’s successor Cardinal Josyf Slipyj—also recognized as Patriarch by Ukrainian Greek Catholics—succeeded in founding a Ukrainian Catholic University in Rome. He had just been permitted to leave the USSR after 18 years in labor camps and internal exile.
While visitors to today’s Ukrainian Catholic University (UCU) in Lviv might be most struck by its array of gleaming buildings erected over the past few years, this history remains the bedrock of the institution. In fact, it was “Profiles of Fortitude”—an oral history project documenting Soviet-era experiences in the underground UGCC—that sparked the initial stage of UCU’s revival in the early 1990s, Roman Skakun of the university’s Institute of Church History explained to the East-West Church Report. This has so far gathered over 2,000 testimonies.
One characteristic account in a 2017 book derived from the project, Persecuted for the Truth: Ukrainian Greek-Catholics behind the Iron Curtain, relates then Metropolitan Slipyj’s ordination of a priest in the Gulag in 1960:
When it had been arranged that the Metropolitan would ordain me, Rev. Drebitko said: “Hey, how are we going to do this without the vestments? We have to think of something.” …I had a coat. We cut off the lining from the coat, cut off the sleeves. …To tell the truth, I was so deeply immersed in that ordination, I had such a desire to become a priest, that I did not feel anything at all during the ceremony—so great was my anxiety. ...The ordination itself took place between the two bunk beds, on the floor, in front of the locker. …It’s difficult to express in words the full meaning of such an event happening behind barbed wire, when you could well get twenty-five more years to your sentence, if they found out about this.
In the early years of the UGCC’s post-perestroika revival, “a counterintuitive vision for an educational institution built on the pillars of the ‘two Ms’—the martyrs and the marginalized” was developed, UCU President Borys Gudziak affirms in his introduction to Persecuted for the Truth. This, he explains, is because such people “can teach us much about principles, endurance, and ultimately about liberty and joy. Thus, UCU started with and was built on the creative and hope-filled fortitude of spiritually free Soviet-era Christians, dissidents, and nonconformists.”
Worship remains central to the life of the university: Greek Catholic students are expected to attend services at least weekly. The towering Church of the Holy Wisdom of God, consecrated in 2017, stands at the center of the main campus. Yet UCU also appears decidedly outward looking: its most popular subjects include politics, economics, and computer science in addition to theology. Numerous summer schools encompass various foreign languages, philosophy, and social thought as well as choristry and icon painting. UCU is also home to the Religious Information Service of Ukraine, a project of its Institute of Religion and Society. This produces reports in English as well as Ukrainian and Russian: https://risu.org.ua/en/index.
In his introduction to Persecuted for the Truth, Gudziak— Archbishop-Metropolitan of Ukrainian Greek Catholics in North America as of mid-2019—argues that Ukraine’s ongoing struggle for dignity as a nation is also inextricably linked with the UGCC’s witness as a cornerstone of civil society in the country. “How the feeble and defenceless defeated the greatest of tyrannies inspires hope… [that we] can win the campaign against corruption, injustice, invasion,” he maintains. “In fact, with God’s grace, we can overcome ourselves, our existential fears and moral frailties.”
Geraldine Fagan is editor of the East-West Church Report.
New Martyr Bishop Vasyl Velychkovsky
One particular inspiration for today’s Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church is Bishop Vasyl Velychkovsky. When a priestmonk, he was arrested in 1945 after the Soviets recaptured Ukraine from the Nazis. Accused of “anti-Soviet propaganda”—partly due to a reference in one of his prayer books to “the wicked, red enemy horde”—his sentence of execution by firing squad was commuted to 10 years in the Gulag. Following his release in 1955, he effectively led the underground UGCC in Ukraine from his small apartment in central Lviv, which became a museum in 2007. There, Sister Epifania—a local young nun of the Greek Catholic Basilian order who is one of the curators—described to the East-West Church Report how the KGB would conduct frequent searches of Bishop Vasyl’s home as well as eavesdrop from his neighbor’s apartment.
However, the neighbor—an elderly Jewish man—would warn the bishop that he was “expecting guests,” and Bishop Vasyl would then conduct services in complete silence to prevent the KGB recording evidence of illegal worship. Despite the surveillance, he was able to ordain approximately 50 Greek Catholic priests at the apartment.
Although Pope John XXIII appointed Velychkovsky bishop in 1959, he could be consecrated only in 1963. That year, Metropolitan Josyf Slipyj was freed from the Gulag and permitted to participate in the Second Vatican Council in Rome. On his way through Moscow, he secretly anointed Velychkovsky in his hotel room. Following his return to Lviv, Bishop Vasyl was imprisoned for his religious activity a second time in 1969. He was finally deported from the USSR in 1972 and died in Canada the following year. Injections of unknown drugs administered to Bishop Vasyl during his second Soviet prison term are believed responsible for his death. He was beatified as a martyr during Pope John Paul II’s visit to Lviv in 2001.
